Framed

Framed is a personal art audio guide app for iPhone and iPad, published by Spencer Yen. It is made for museum visits: instead of renting a museum's own audio guide, a visitor points the phone at a painting or sculpture and Framed produces a spoken description of it, powered by AI. Away from a museum, the app also lets people browse and learn about artworks collected by the Framed community.

The user takes a picture of any artwork or searches for it by name. Framed identifies the work and generates an audio guide description for it. Guides come in different styles: the default style, a style called fun felix that gives 10 fun facts, and theo's threes, which tells just three things to know. Users can collect and curate their own collection of favourite artworks inside the app.

Framed is free to download with in-app purchases. Framed Premium unlocks unlimited artworks and audio guide generations and is listed at $2.99, $5.99 and $17.99. The app requires iOS 16.6 or iPadOS 16.6 or later, runs on Macs with an Apple M1 chip on macOS 14.0 or later and on Apple Vision with visionOS 1.0 or later, and lists French, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Spanish among its languages. Feedback can be sent by text from the settings screen.

Use cases

• A personal audio guide during a museum visit
• Learning about artworks around the world from home
• Curating a collection of favourite works